5 easy steps to publishing your next blog post (even if you don’t have time)

This post was originally published in April 2017 and was updated in 2019 just for you!

You’ve got a blog – great!

You haven’t published for at least a month – not so great.

The reality is, your blog can be a central point in your marketing strategy. In our research we see visitors to client’s sites spending 4-7 minutes on a blog post, but only 1-2 minutes on any other page. That’s a huge opportunity!

Think of your blog like this:

Imagine you rented a small meeting room in a hotel. You advertised, told all your clients, friends, neighbours and emailed like crazy to your mailing list. And let’s say 100 people showed up.

Great right?

And those 100 people listened to you talk for about 4-7 minutes. That’s an enormous opportunity to get, let’s say, 10 people to make a sale. That’s what your blog could be doing…day after day, 12 months a year.

“If you want to continually grow your blog, you need to learn to blog on a consistent basis.”

Neil Patel

At BlogWorks, we want your blog to be humming along making sales. So, let’s deal with how to get new blog posts published.

Through our work with hundreds of clients we’ve developed a 5 step process to consistent blogging. You can use this process to rescue a stale blog (haven’t published for a while) or improve the existing process you have.

Here goes…5 steps to consistent blogging:

#1. Create an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) (20 minutes)

If you don’t have a process, you’re wasting time inventing one every time you write a blog.

Make a list (use Google Docs to easily share with the freelancer you will hire!) of all the steps you follow to write and publish your blog. We wrote an article on this here.

#2. Make a list of 36 blog topics (30 minutes)

Pour yourself a nice Merlot, or crack a beer—you need to be in a creative mood for this part. Make a list of all the blog topics you can think of that will:

Face it – you will never have enough time to write a blog. So you have to make time by blocking it. Twice a month block 60 minutes on your calendar to write your, as the wonderful author Anne Lamott famously named it, shitty first draft.

Block another 30 minutes to clean up the draft, add images and publish. Those 4 hours a month will increase your traffic, build your list, attract prospects and grow your business. What else would you be doing with that time?

#4. Use a 3-step writing routine

One reason our clients don’t get their blog published is because they don’t have a writing routine. Just like your SOP (#1 above), a writing routine takes the mystery and stress out of writing a post (it’s how I’m writing this post!)

2 – Use a template to write your shitty first draft (45 min). Don’t edit, don’t worry about spelling, don’t even worry about making sense…you have one goal – get the draft done in 45 minutes, then take a break. Get your template here.

3 – Edit,add images, quotes, links and publish (30 min).

#5. Think money, not task (timeless)

As long as “write blog” competes with everything else crowding your To-Do list, it ain’t going to happen. You have to think money!

Your blog is the magnet that will get readers to slow down and look at what you sell. Just like a magazine, T.V. show or half time concert at the Super Bowl – content (or entertainment) attracts buyers and gets them to look at your products and services.

Put another way, unless you’re Amazon or Alibaba, nobody will visit your website to look at what you’re advertising—you need your blog to bring them back.